1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a reception apparatus and method and a program, and more particularly to a reception apparatus and method and a program wherein a TCE (TCP Offload Engine) is used for communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the prior art, the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is available as one of protocols which are used in a network such as the Internet. The TCP/IP was originally incorporated as software in the UNIX (registered trademark). Also at present, most part of processing of the TCP/IP is imposed on software. However, as the network transfer demand of data of a great volume increases, the demand for higher speed operation of the processing of the TCP/IP has been and is increasing.
In order to satisfy the demand, for example, a technique called TOE (TCP Offload Engine) is available. According to the TOE, processing of the TCP/IP for which a CPU (Central Processing Unit) resource on the host side is used is performed by another chip (hardware for exclusive use). With the TOE, the CPU resource on the host side can be allocated only to the processing of an application program, and consequently, the load on the CPU on the host side can be reduced and the rate of the processing of the TCP/IP can be raised.
An improved transmission apparatus which transmits packets has been proposed formerly by the inventor of the present invention and is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-229905 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Document 1). In the transmission apparatus, AV (Audio Visual) data inputted are stored once into an AV buffer circuit, and then a jumbo packet of 32 kilobytes is produced from the AV data. The term jumbo packet is used herein as a packet in which data of a size greater than that of a packet of the Ethernet (registered trademark) are placed. Then, the thus produced jumbo packet is disintegrated based on a header produced by a CPU to produce packets of 1,518 bytes in the maximum such that is can be transmitted as the packets.